The Peruvian poet César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza (1892–1938) was part of an avant-garde movement in twentieth-century Spanish literature and has a reputation for difficulty, but this particular poem, one of his most celebrated, seems clear enough, reflecting as it does his sense of mortality and his experiences of being persecuted in his own country: suspect because of his reformist political views, he was accused of a crime he did not commit and thrown into jail, and though later released felt forced, in order to escape further persecution, to emigrate to Europe, where he spent the rest of his life in exile.

The title of the poem is enigmatic and various theories have been put forward to explain it, such as that it refers to the custom whereby the Romans, according to Ovid, used white stones and black stones to denote good and bad days respectively.

Incidentally Vallejo died on a Friday in spring, not, as he foresaw in this poem, on a Thursday in autumn. You can always rely on reality to get things wrong.

The translation that follows is my own.

Piedra Negra Sobre Una Piedra Blanca

Me moriré en París con aguacero,
un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.
Me moriré en París – y no me corro –
tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.

Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso
estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto
a la mala y, jamás como hoy, me he vuelto,
con todo mi camino, a verme solo.

César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban
todos sin que él les haga nada;
le daban duro con un palo y duro

también con una soga; son testigos
los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,
la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos…

César Vallejo

Black Stone On A White Stone

I shall die in Paris on a day of rain,
A day whose memory I keep already.
I shall die in Paris – I shall not run away –
Perhaps like today on a Thursday, a day of autumn.

It will be a Thursday because today, the day
I write these verses, is Thursday, and I put on
My arm bones wrong, and never have I been
So alone as today, with all my road before me.

Cesar Vallejo is dead, whom they would beat,
All of them, though he never does harm to them.
They would give it to him hard with a stick and hard

Also with a rope, as these bear witness,
These Thursdays, and the bones of my upper arms
Along with solitude, the rain, the roads…